Kickstart This: The Deer God Seeks to Rule the PC

The concept of the hunter becoming the hunted is nothing very new. However, The Deer God, a forthcoming PC adventure game from Crescent Moon Games, is an innovative and beautifully rendered take on the idea.

Following a hunting incident, your character has a strange experience and finds himself occupying the body of a marvelous wild stag. Unlike other body-switching adventures, the objective of this game is not about returning to the human life you left behind. Instead, you must learn to live as a deer, and the choices you make will affect your karma, and determine how you will be reincarnated when you die. Through a series of lifetimes, players strive to become an elder deer in the forest.

Your life is filled with and enhanced by many different encounters throughout the randomly-generated pixel forest. The journey will include exploring caverns to find statues, which contain the wisdom of the ancients; discovering and unlocking these will bestow certain skills upon you. Avoid hunters and hunting cabins, and interact with other forms of wildlife including cardinals, herons, rabbits, foxes, and more. Find does and mate with them to create offspring (and save points), and when necessary, fight with other stags in order to gain access to the female of the species. Above all, make choices which will please the eponymous Deer God, because otherwise, you might get reincarnated as something considerably less majestic than a stag.

The developers have launched a Kickstarter campaign to get their game moving, with the plan to deliver incentives – including alpha builds – this Autumn. Other incentives include mugs and t-shirts bearing some of the game’s charming graphics, a stunning art book, and the original soundtrack composed by Evan Gipson. Sample tracks can be enjoyed on the Kickstarter page.

The Deer God is already in Steam Greenlight’s top 50 games. If you would like to help bring this survival platformer to PC, Mac, and Linux, check out the Kickstarter today.

Laura, to borrow a phrase from Metal Gear Solid 3, has one good eye and can still fire a gun. She refers to herself as a "video dame," and has been an avid gamer on various platforms since she first picked up a Pong controller over 30 years ago. She takes great delight in explaining different games to her husband.